Why a Mobot Race

An autonomous robotic agent consists of a real physical artifact
that#includes perception, action, and reasoning
capabilities. The robot needs to be able to perceive features of
the world and to navigate towards the achievement of its
goals. Building an autonomous robotic agent is a challenging
task of great interest to the advance of the scientific areas of
robotics and artificial intelligence.

The Mobot competition is designed to allow the participants to
explore some of the main technical aspects involved in building
an autonomous robotic agent. Concretely, in the Mobot
competition, the robot needs to follow a white line on the
ground outdoors along a specific path. This task includes a set
of technical difficulties, including the mechanical construction
of the robot to allow for outdoors navigation on non-flat
terrain; the development of robot sensors to robustly detect the
relevant features of the task, in particular the white line; and
reasoning rules that allow the robot to select the appropriate
actions. Participants in the competition successfully acquire
on-hands research experience in this full range of scientific
challenges.